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Prettifying the NetBSD console

April 01, 2012 posted by Michael Lorenz

Over the last few months, many of NetBSD's graphical console drivers have gained the ability to use anti-aliased fonts. This was done mostly as a way to allow relatively easy access to a vast number of fonts, but they also look a lot better than plain monochrome fonts. With the genfb(4) driver this feature is available on almost all supported hardware which supports graphics. Some specialized drivers also support it (such as radeonfb(4), r128fb(4), voodoofb(4), ffb(4) and voyagerfb(4) ) and more are being added over time.

In order to improve overall usability and to give NetBSD a more unified look across different platforms, we are going to use a single default font and colour scheme on all platforms. Since studies prove its superiour readability we are proud to announce that Microsoft has granted permission to use the Comic Sans font in all future NetBSD releases.

Screenshots:

[9 comments]

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Comments:

That's a good one! :)

Posted by Eddie Thieda on April 01, 2012 at 01:48 AM UTC #

As a long time dyslexia sufferer, I am 001% behind this!

Posted by wily on April 01, 2012 at 04:47 AM UTC #

You owe me a new keyboard.

Posted by Rainne on April 01, 2012 at 07:35 AM UTC #

I severly hate > 1 colour in my terminals. I really want a way to disable "fonts" and other stuff that are going to a) annoy me b) waste cycles on my VAX

Posted by Al Boyanich on April 01, 2012 at 09:45 AM UTC #

Lets hope its 1st april joke

Posted by meh on April 01, 2012 at 01:32 PM UTC #

Brilliant. Plain brilliant.

Posted by John Hackett on April 01, 2012 at 05:17 PM UTC #

Nice ! Thank you

Posted by Nikolay Kalev on April 02, 2012 at 10:25 AM UTC #

Al, I'm with you here. We are not Linux crowd that tries to be fancy with all types of antialiased fonts and colors on the console. I'm still using a lot of old monochrome CRT's and DEC terminals. Instead of antialiased fonts it would be nice to improve things which are *really* useful like scrollback buffer in the console which is buggy at the moment.

Posted by Andy Kosela on April 05, 2012 at 12:52 PM UTC #

First, as I told you before, that's a bug in the vga driver, not wscons. Second, if it annoys you so much, why don't you fix it?

Posted by Michael on April 07, 2012 at 08:41 PM UTC #